Now that Major League Baseball’s regular season has ended with the wild wildcard win by the Kansas City Royals over the Oakland A’s and with the Pittsburgh Pirates being eliminated by the San Francisco Giants, I've once again begun analyzing the probability of each team advancing through each round of baseball’s postseason.

The Los Angeles Dodgers (71%) and the Washington Nationals (68%) have the greatest chance of advancing to the National League Championship Series going into their first Division Series games. The Kansas City Royals (61%) and Baltimore Orioles (64%) after winning the first game of their Division Series have turned themselves from underdogs into favorites.


Image of Andrew McCutchen: Credit: RJ Schmidt, Flckr. CC BY-ND 2.0

Each year, at the season’s start, I project the number of wins each team should earn. Back in March, my model picked 7 of the 10 post-season teams, a result as good or better than most of the experts at Yahoo Sports, Sports Illustrated, ESPN etc.  My method uses a Markov process approach, originally published in the journal Operations Research, and it enables one to assess prospective trades and evaluate who should win the Most Valuable Player and Cy Young Awards among various other applications.

Team	Game 1		Game 2		Game 3		Game 4		Game 5
	Starter	P(win)	Starter	P(win)	Starter	P(win)	Starter	P(win)	Starter	P(win)
DET-Tigers	Scherzer	0.494	Verlander	0.456	Price	0.618	Porcello	0.568	Scherzer	0.494
BAL-Orioles	Tillman	0.506	Chen	0.544	Gausman	0.382	Norris	0.432	Tillman	0.506
KCA-Royals	Vargas	0.430	Ventura	0.375	Shields	0.593	Guthrie	0.405	Vargas	0.430
ANA-Angels	Weaver	0.570	Shoemaker	0.625	Wilson	0.407	Rasmus	0.595	Weaver	0.570
SLN-Cardinals	Waiwright	0.336	Lynn	0.378	Lackey	0.462	Miller	0.528	Wainwright	0.336
LAN-Dodgers	Kershaw	0.664	Greinke	0.622	Haren	0.538	Hernandez	0.472	Kershaw	0.664
SFN-Giants	Hudson	0.357	Petit	0.464	Vogelsong	0.431	Bumgarner	0.530	Hudson	0.357
WAS-Nationals	Zimmerman	0.643	Strasburg	0.536	Roark	0.569	Gonzalez	0.470	Zimmerman	0.643

For the series, we have the following probabilities of winning each match-up:

		Win in 3	Win in 4	Win in 5	P(win series)
American League	Tigers vs.Orioles
	Tigers win	0.139	0.224	0.186	0.549
	Orioles win	0.105	0.156	0.190	0.451
	Royals vs. Angels
	Royals win	0.096	0.142	0.161	0.399
	Angels win	0.145	0.243	0.213	0.601
National League
	Cardinals vs. Dodgers
	Cardinals win	0.059	0.148	0.122	0.330
	Dodgers win	0.222	0.2-7	0.242	0.671
	Giants vs. Nationals
	Giants win	0.071	0.162	0.132	0.365
	Nationals win	0.196	0.201	0.238	0.635

On my website, I provide the likelihood of each team taking the series in a given number of games. These numbers are revised as the probabilities change with the progression of each series.

During the season I also apply the model to determine whether it is worthwhile to wager on games each day during the baseball season. My picks have led to positive results for 9 of the 14 years (counting 2014’s thus far somewhat disappointing performance) he has been doing this.



My MVP and Cy Young results and the updated method to produce them have appeared in the International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sports. The model computes the probability of a team with given hitters, bench, starting pitcher, lineup, relievers scoring any number of runs along with home field advantage to compute the chance each team has to win a game. 

My model also tied for first this season at Baseballphd.net’s annual contest to pick the teams who would make it to the playoffs.after being the sole winner 3 times from 2010-2013.